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Online Reputation Management: Listen To Your Customers

Reputation management is critical for businesses in the digital age. The internet has made it easier for customers to share their experiences with your company, positive or negative. As a business owner, you need to be proactive about online reputation management and listen to your customers.

As companies grow increasingly reliant on the internet for sales, the importance of online reputation management (ORM) has grown as well. Bad reputation can easily dissuade potential customers from buying from you; likewise, good reputations can lead to staggeringly more business.

Your online reputation is determined by what others say about you online. This includes reviews on websites like Yelp, G2, and BBB, as well as comments on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

If you’re not proactive about online reputation management, it can be difficult to track what people are saying about your company. In this article, we’ll cover 3 ways to improve your online reputation by listening to your customers.

1. Monitor Your Online Reputation

The first step in improving your online reputation is to monitor what’s being said about you online. Monitoring your online reputation allows you to track your brand’s reputation and respond quickly to any negative publicity.

A crucial piece here is the use of multiple channels to do so: not just Google Alerts, but also review sites, social media, and forums. You also need to set up a system to track what’s being said about your brand on the web & social media. Intelligent Google searches and social media monitoring tools like Retention360 can help you aggregate customer communication into one unified dashboard.

An effective second step is utilizing AI text analysis, like that offered by Retention360, to then post-process your review and reputation data. This can then present you with actionable information on customer intent and perception, which you can use to improve your customer retention rates and overall customer experience.

2. Respond To Customer Complaints Quickly

If you’re monitoring your online reputation, you’ll quickly notice when someone has a complaint about your company. It’s important to respond quickly and apologize for the inconvenience.

A study by the University of Denver found that companies who responded to complaints within 24 hours yielded an 88% satisfaction rate. If they didn’t reply at all, though, that satisfaction rate (and the resulting resolutions) dropped to just 1%.

Not only is it important to reply quickly, but you also need to respond politely and professionally. Thank the customer for bringing the issue to your attention, apologize for the inconvenience, and let them know that you’re working to resolve the issue. Incorporating this into your customer retention strategy is key.  A good template to use for responding to complaints is the 5-P formula:

Problem: Acknowledge the issue and describe it.

Promise: Promise to fix the problem as soon as possible.

Plan: Describe the plan of action you will take to resolve the issue.

Person: Assign a specific person or team to be in charge of resolving the complaint.

Period: Let the customer know when they can expect a resolution.

For example, “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’re sorry that you had such a negative experience and we want to make it right. Our DevOps team is working on resolving the issue and we’ll update you sometime in the next 48 hours.”

A short and simple message that takes ownership and addressed the issue, while also giving a time frame as to when the issue will be fixed.  People who have a positive customer service experience are more likely to give the business another chance. 

3. Use Social Media to Your Benefit

The strength of responding to reviews publicly on social media is that it opens up a two-way communication channel with your customers. It also gives you the opportunity to showcase your customer service skills, and can function as free advertising for your company when things go right.

Social media is a crucial part of online reputation management and should be used to its fullest potential. Retention360 offers a robust direct-response tool that lets you connect with customers who have had a poor experience right on our platform. This helps organize customer data to turn your complainers into champions and directly improve the customer experience. 

In closing

Businesses need to be proactive about online reputation management and listen to their customers. There are three primary ways to do this:

1) Respond to negative reviews quickly and politely, addressing the customer’s concerns.

2) Use social media listening tools to track what people are saying about your company online.

3) Monitor your online search results to make sure that the good and bad information about your company is balanced.

If you follow these tips, you’ll be well on your way to improving your online reputation increasing customer loyalty. Retention360 can help with this process. We offer a suite of services to help you manage your online reputation. Including review monitoring and response, social media monitoring and engagement, and AI-driven text analysis to help you understand what people mean when they talk about your company online. Book a 10-minute demo call to get started today! 

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Customer Surveys For Better Consumer Insights

As technology lies increasingly at the core of many products, many companies are turning to customer surveys to gain critical insights into how well their products are meeting customer needs.

This article will dissect the benefits of customer feedback surveys, as well as outline some best practices for their use. Our goal is to provide businesses with the tools & knowledge to improve their products and better understand customer needs.

Let’s get started!

What’s a Customer Survey?

To start, customer surveys are questionnaires or polls that are sent to customers to assess their thoughts on a product or service. They can be administered in a variety of ways, including online surveys, phone interviews, or customer feedback forms.

Some surveys take the form of short, one-question polls, while others consist of detailed questionnaires that can take up to 15 minutes to complete. Regardless of the length or complexity of the survey, the goal is always to gain insights into customer attitudes and behaviors, and to do it in a way that is both cost-effective and efficient.

After the survey, the customer’s responses are analyzed and used to improve the product or service. Historically, this analysis was done by hand, but today, there are a variety of software programs that help make the process more efficient. Retention360, for example, provides an AI-based sentiment analysis tool that automatically digests and understands customer feedback for you before providing actionable insights.

Why Customer Surveys?

As our world grows more and more digital, businesses are seeking new ways to understand how their products are being used. Customer surveys offer a reliable and efficient way to collect customer feedback. Additionally, from a competitiveness standpoint, customer surveys can also help businesses understand how they compare to their peers.

Generally speaking, customer surveys offer the following benefits:

– They provide a snapshot of customer sentiment at a given point in time

– They help identify customer needs and pain points

– They can be used to track changes in customer sentiment over time

– They can help identify areas for product improvement

– They can help benchmark product performance against competitors

It’s important to note that not all surveys are created equal. Well designed surveys offer the most value, as they can provide rich and actionable insights. In order to get the most out of customer surveys, it’s important to carefully construct your customer survey for maximum effectiveness.

How to Build Effective Customer Surveys

One of the core principles of customer survey building is to keep them short and simple. Long surveys can be daunting for customers to complete, leading to low response rates and inaccurate data.

Additionally, the longer the survey, the more likely it is that the information you’re collecting is noisy, self-interest-driven, or otherwise non-representative of your data sample. As such, it’s important to ask only the most important questions and to keep surveys concise.

Another key principle is to make sure surveys are relevant to customers. The goal is to improve the customer experience, meaning that questions should be tailored to the product or service being offered and should reflect the customer’s unique needs and wants. For example, a question about how often a customer uses a product may be irrelevant for a product that is used only once a year.

Finally, survey questions should be easy to understand. This means avoiding jargon and ensuring that all questions are clearly worded. Ambiguous questions can lead to inaccurate responses and confusion among customers. Politicians have a habit of building leading questions into their surveys which distort the answers given. Product surveys, on the other hand, should be so simple that a five-year-old could answer any type of questions in the survey.

Retention360 works hand-in-hand with restaurants and product-based businesses to develop effective surveys that capture customer needs. We help collect the right customer information, like email and phone number, and then bundle that into an automated intent analysis pipeline that can help deliver strong customer insights.

In closing

Customer surveys are an indispensable market research tool that can provide your business with a wealth of valuable insights into customer needs and preferences, to ultimately increase your customer retention rate.

In a modern world where consumers are more demanding than ever, it is essential to have a clear understanding of what they want in order to stay ahead of the competition. By conducting regular customer surveys, you can obtain this crucial information and use it to improve your products and services, boost sales, and increase customer loyalty.

If you’re looking to gain a competitive edge, Retention360 is the choice for you. With our powerful customer survey tool, you can obtain feedback directly from your customers and get the insights you need to improve your business. Our direct-response tool also makes it easy to reach out to customers on social media & other platforms to improve their experience with your brand.

Book a demo today!